K.Mandla's blog of Linux experiences

A monospace font beauty pageant

I got a note the other day from Sam Block about the Tamsyn font, which is a beautiful little arrangement in a nice array of small point sizes.

Tamsyn’s only shortcoming, and one that Sam pointed out, is that it lacks a lot of the line drawing characters that make things like mc fun to look at. Without them … it’s interesting, to say the least.

Looking at that brings up a couple of other fonts that should get attention. Here’s erusfont, which only has two sizes in Arch but is remarkably clear, even at the smallest.

Also clean and straight. This next one is ugly as sin to me: FixedSys.

I don’t see the appeal there, unless I’m looking for something as homage to first-generation MacIntoshes. Here’s Monte Carlo though, which is quite nice.

I could learn to love that. This last one comes in about a thousand different flavors and arrangements: Proggy.

That’s just one of the several thousand that you get in Arch when you ask for the one. It’s like a free buffet.

There are some other fonts that are interesting, if you’re working in a text-only arrangement. Inconsolata is quite attractive, the downside for me being the fact that it seems to be unworkable in a terminal. And I get some smearing here and there.

But I think I’ll stick with Terminus for now. If Tamsyn picks up line-drawing characters I might jump ship, but for now this is the best for me. ;)

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15 thoughts on “A monospace font beauty pageant”

This is sort of related, and perhaps you will have an answer, but In Kubuntu when writing in a post the text decides to do something contrary to system settings. Now I know your main web-browser is textual so you probably don’t see it to often but have you ever had a similar problem? Of Any sort.

Hmm.. I have been trying to discover how to change console fonts based on your recent post, on my gNewSense (Debian-squeeze-based) system). I found the “consolechars” command which works for changing to pre-loaded fonts, but when trying to use new fonts, the command outputs the error: “read_simple_font(): Bad font file format” Are you using a different command to change fonts? Are there additional steps required to add new fonts?

For me? Well, Ray … probably 486 or before. I haven’t even seen a nonworking 486 in years, let alone a working one. I’d love to try to get one working, but I have a feeling it will be a while before I see another. :( Almost sad, that is. …